My wife and I moved from the Midwest to the East Coast a few years ago. There was a predictable amount of culture shock for both of us in leaving the manifest blessings of the Midwest: Housing prices (you can buy a palace for what a garage might cost elsewhere). Traffic (four drivers politely waving each other through at a four-way stop). Endless expanses of corn and soybeans (OK, those do get boring after a while, but they make current talk of tariffs affecting crop prices much more real).

I have been a news junkie almost all my life. I’ve read a daily newspaper since grammar school, progressing from comics to sports to the front page. I was the first one in my family to get up in the morning, so I was the first to fetch the newspaper from the driveway.

Alfie Evans was born on May 9, 2016. He died on April 28, 2018. For 16 and a half months, he was a patient of Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool. By the time he died, a good portion of the world was aware of his short life and the battle his parents waged to prolong it.

I often follow along in my missalette the words of the entire Mass, not because I am pious but because I am a chronic daydreamer. Looking at the words on the page and thinking about them can keep me focused … for a while. But then something sends me off again.

Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address after being elected president, saw the looming inevitability of civil war. In that first talk to the nation, he emotionally appealed to his divided countrymen to not become enemies nor “break our bonds of affection.”

In 1961, there was a best-selling book called “Black Like Me.” It was the story of a journalist named John Howard Griffin, who changed his skin color from white to black and traveled through the South so that he could learn, as the book’s subtitle said, “what it is like to live the life of a Negro by becoming one!”